It’s Every ‘Band’ for Itself on Social Media as FitBit Wins on Twitter, Jawbone on YouTube and other Fun Facts Involving Nike and Basis according to New Unmetric Report

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The first ever social media report for fitness bands reveals fierce competition amongst brands, Nike plays tug of war for championship with underdogs like Basis.

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“Wearable fitness band users are enthusiastic and vocal about fitness, which means there’s a lot of potential for brands to engage with customers,” said Lux Narayan, Unmetric’s CEO.

New York, NY (PRWEB)October 31, 2013

Today Unmetric, the leader in social media competitive intelligence, released its Fitness Bands Social Shape Up Report. The report is the first to investigate how top fitness bands – Basis, BodyMedia FIT, FitBit, Jawbone, and Nike+ Fuelband – measure up on social media, while offering brand managers insights on what works and what fails when connecting with consumers.

Unmetric sourced the wealth of data from its social media intelligence platform to reveal who really comes out on top in content strategy, engagement, growth and frequency of posts across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest during the month of August 2013.

The report shows that the space is ultra-competitive with no dominant brand emerging as the social media champion across all four platforms. Broken down more granularly, some brands rose to the surface on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest. Nike+ Fuelband’s size gives it victory on Facebook, but smaller and quieter Basis sees the most engaged fans. Nike also ruled on Twitter, with FitBit rapidly closing the distance in terms of follower size and engagement. Jawbone blows its competitors out of the water on YouTube by focusing on entertainment over ads, and BodyMedia FIT wins Pinterest by putting brand-relevant and logo-free content in its pictures.

How did the data break down by platform?

Facebook:

Nike+ Fuelband is the dominant brand on Facebook, mostly because it has the largest fan base (192,238). While social media success is defined beyond the sheer number of fans, Nike’s uncanny ability to reach to nearly twice as many people as FitBit – its next-most-popular competitor – is a difficult advantage to ignore.

Yet in terms of engagement, Basis beat out the other brands. By observing and balancing the total number of Likes, Shares and Comments each post receives, Unmetric produces a benchmarkable number to measure engagement. Basis only made five unsolicited posts in August, but it had the highest engagement on average with a score of 112 (nearly double the group average of 57). This disproves the theory that more social content always equals more fan conversation.

Basis sees the highest engagement from posts types that other brands ignore – namely new product announcements. A single post in that category – the announcement of updates to its Android app – earned an engagement score of 109, giving fans an opportunity to celebrate the brand’s new capabilities and provide feedback for further updates.

Winners: Nike+ Fuelband and Basis

Twitter:

Again, Nike+ Fuelband also comes out on top, because of its group-leading 168,078 followers. To put that in perspective, that’s four times as many as any competitor. Nike can’t rest on this lead however, as FitBit grew its follower base faster than any other brand, adding an impressive 8.1 percent in August.

Posts with hashtags prove the most engaging, and FitBit is riding that trend to engagement success. Its hashtags earn an average engagement score of 495 (more than doubling the group average of 240). Fun hashtags like #FitBitSummer resulted in FitBit’s higher interaction with its audience, giving users a reason to post around their commitment to personal fitness over the summer.

Winners: Nike+ Fuelband and FitBit

YouTube:

Jawbone is far and away the most successful brand when it comes to YouTube videos. Its videos have 13 times as many views (4,590,626) as the other three brands combined (note: Nike+ Fuelband does not maintain a dedicated YouTube channel). Jawbone also has 4,519 subscribers—a huge lead over FitBit’s second-place 535 subscribers. Most importantly, Jawbone’s videos provide entertainment value beyond the product. Its music video featuring Snoop Dogg only subtly endorses Jawbone, yet it has been viewed over 1.8 million times because it appeals to a much broader market.

Conversely, Basis, BodyMedia FIT and FitBit generally use YouTube as an avenue for advertising and customer support, but miss out by ignoring its value as a platform for pure entertainment and social interaction.

Winner: Jawbone

Pinterest:

Pinterest remains a largely untapped resource for the fitness band space. Both Nike+ Fuelband and Basis do not maintain Pinterest profiles, and the remaining three brands are yet to establish large presences or distinct strategies for the network. This makes it an attractive platform for any of the bands to invest in early to become the leader. BodyMedia FIT had the best engagement, getting the most total repins (5,320) and the most re-pins per image posted (48). It is also improving the fastest, seeing the largest growth in both repins (100 percent) and likes (100 percent).

BodyMedia finds success by leaving the ads behind and focusing on inspirational or humorous graphics—its “Instant Inspiration,” “Motivational Wednesday” and “Laughter” boards highlight this approach. One post on BodyMedia’s “Laughter” board – a graphic about people’s workout postures – received 71 re-pins. While the post is about exercise, which is relevant to BodyMedia, it doesn’t deter potential re-pinners with an overtly brand-focused message.

Winner: BodyMedia FIT

“Wearable fitness band users are enthusiastic and vocal about fitness, which means there’s a lot of potential for brands to engage with customers,” said Lux Narayan, Unmetric’s CEO. “By carefully analyzing the social media strategies of competitors, fitness band makers can learn how to build communities around products and give people more reasons to get excited about personal fitness.”

Using a combination of advanced algorithms and human computing power, Unmetric delivers data and benchmark insights for various industry sectors that were previously unavailable, such as content strategy, engagement, growth, timing and frequency of posts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest. Unmetric supplies a distinct, high-demand service that ensures companies will never have to fly blind on social media again. Now brands are finally able to answer the basic business question “how do we stack up against our competition?” when it comes to social media presence.

Methodology:

Unmetric compiled its report by sourcing data from its social media benchmarking platform. All statistics were gathered from August 1st-31st, 2013.

About Unmetric:

Unmetric is headquartered in New York City and works with category leading brands and innovative agencies across the world. Unmetric provides not-so-obvious competitive intelligence on over 10,000 global brands across 30 industry sectors, helping brands and their agencies to comprehend and calibrate their social media efforts, and compete with intelligence and efficiency. The client list includes iconic brands like Subway, Toyota, Cisco, and Lowe's Home Improvement, and premier agencies like GroupM, MRY, Golin Harris, and the Zocalo Group. For more information, visit http://www.unmetric.com.